Chapter Seven

Terrence opened his "My Music" Folder. He had a lot of good music, or so he felt, ranging from Ghostface Killah to Dizzy Gillespie, Rachmaninoff to Nicholas Tse. But the problem with music, or indeed any other sensory material, is that the longer you are exposed to them the less stimulating to the mind they become, and Terrence had slowly become apathetic and disinterested towards his current music collection. He shuffled through an assortment of folders and files for a few minutes, and upon failing to find a track that would enhance his current sentiments, he took upon an unorthodox operation to remedy the situation - if he wasn't able to find suitable music, he would create his own instead. Terrence had long had an interest in music production and composition, and with such experience and the necessary tools of digital media, he was able to go right about doing so.

He opened Fruity Loops 7 and started playing with the instrumental effects. He wanted a lush, sweeping sound of melancholy with a hint of optimism, and settled for a string ensemble with a simple minor scale played in syncopation to the repeated drum loop in the background. He added an orchestral harmony to strengthen the presence of the melody, and then some broken chords on a clavinova for added mystique. A flute solo, some sound effects, a sampled Winston Churchill speech...

It was easy to create simple looped patterns on instruments, but it was much harder to string them together into a proper song, together with intro and outro and all. It took Terrence the better part of a day to complete the song, and by the time he was done it was perhaps no longer an accurate reflection of his current mood anymore. Nevertheless, he was fairly proud of what he had accomplished and exported the finished song into mp3 format and played it out loud on his M-Audio desktop audio monitors.

The panning on the ambience in the intro was a little messed up.
The timing on the drum fill-ins were not rhythmically precise.
The flute solo was too soft, and faded out too quickly.
The song needed rap lyrics.

Terrence felt that all those issues were minor enough to be ignored, except for the problem with the lack of lyrics. The track was good, but it would be too boring without lyrics, he thought. He had never written lyrics before, but he was determined to try. For the first 5 minutes he looked around his room, desparately trying to draw some sort of lyrical inspiration from his Obama posters and patterned curtains, but it didn't really work, so he gave that up. He had several business textbooks on his desk too, but those didn't really help either.

Terrence let out a long sigh, lit up a cigarette and let the smoke surround him. Drawing from the nicotine stimulation, he started scribbling words down onto a piece of lined paper.